We want the food at our nights to be excellent, healthy, and inexpensive and we have been working with Glasgow-based artist and chef Reed Hexamer to provide this. Reed is one of the founders of Feed The People Bedstuy, a mutual aid community project in New York City that provides 150+ free meals weekly for food shares, jail support, teach-ins, and union actions, using food that would otherwise be discarded.
It runs on the principles of solidarity over charity and delicious food as a human right. You can find more information on donating or getting involved at @feedthepeople_bedstuy.
We caught up with Reed to learn more about mutual aid, their art practice and recovery.
1. Hello Reed! First off – what brings you to Glasgow?
Hi GCF! Super happy to be chatting. I’m here pursuing a Masters in Fine Art at the GSA (and also because I love Glasgow!)
2. A lot of people might not know what ‘mutual aid’ means. What does the term mean to you and how have you ended up getting involved with mutual aid projects?
Mutual Aid to me refers to systems of care and solidarity that challenge the one-directional “have and have nots” framework you see in charity. A more rhizomatic approach to care that recognizes our interdependence and empowers us to show up for each other outside of the avenues provided to us by the state or nonprofits. Instead of waiting for permission to help each other we assist each other directly and with a sense of reciprocity. It’s a refusal to professionalize our modes of caring. The possibilities of mutual aid unfold when we trust each other, pushing back against individualism and suspicion in a society that often encourages these forms of relation. Mutual aid shows us that we really do belong deeply to each other – we are each other’s responsibility.
For me, mutual aid is also about how respect, dignity and autonomy need to be at the centre of how we care for each other – we not only have a right to food, but to food that is delicious, to our ancestral foods, seed sovereignty and to community itself. It makes visible the systems and politics at play that create unequal access to resources instead of seeing lack of access as a consequence of bad luck, moral failing or “just the way things are”. Instead, mutual aid operates from the understanding that our struggles are interconnected instead of seeing people as “other”. Once we make this interrelation visible we see with more clarity the other levels food work operates on beyond the biological. Food work isn’t just about meeting the needs of the body but also an expression of spiritual first aid, dignity, emotional comfort or even a display of political solidarity.
I’ve been involved in mutual aid projects for a very long time. I think mutual aid unfolds naturally in pockets of communities that need to rely on each other to get by and I’ve been grateful to have experienced mutual aid through most of my life even before I found the language to describe it. I’ve fed others and I’ve also been fed when I didn’t have resources so that’s definitely shaped the way I organize. In New York I was involved with Feed the People Bedstuy and before that cooked through different Food not Bombs chapters in other cities I’ve lived in. Often mutual aid has just meant grabbing friends and neighbours to cook without any sort of official group affiliation for jail support, migrants being bussed into the city, union strikes and picket lines, shelters, community fridges, workshops, teach-ins etc. Just regular people finding and filling needs together. It’s been really wonderful to start contributing to mutual aid projects here in Scotland as well, and cooking for Good Clean Fun has been a great way to funnel funds into this work!
3. Can you tell us about your art practice and how mutual aid might tie in with this practice?
While I see mutual aid work as separate from my personal sculpture and research practice I do find that their functions overlap. Mutual aid unsettles hierarchical ways of understanding community and care, it’s not just about aid but also about questioning the order of things. Similarly, I see the role of art as a tool to unsettle order, archives, truth and myth.
There have been some instances where my art practice and mutual aid engagements have directly overlapped. I’ve used my art practice to support different projects like creating prints to sell to fund food costs that remain after utilizing food waste, creating educational flyers around land and growing rights, making zines / workshops about low cost bulk cooking or painting community fridges. My art works also often engage with food practices as fundraising strategies. I have put on sliding scale dinners and performances in collaboration with so-called “invasive” foraged plants and the fruits of supposedly dead community gardens which fed funds back into free food projects. My creative practice certainly helps because cooking with food waste can require some imagination and flexibility!
My most recent food fundraiser was the sliding scale four course dinner The Minotaur’s Desire in collaboration with Katie Grenville. The meal traced the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur through the Minotaur’s perspective using symbolic dishes, food sculptures and writings while raising funds for eSIMs that were distributed to Palestinians in Gaza who have been cut off from the internet. If interested in supporting eSIM distribution in Palestine you can find out more here.
4. How does mutual aid tie in with recovery?
When people ask me how we could support and care for each other without instruction from charities, businesses or governments I could take them to a free food share I work with or an ACA meeting I attend. I see both spaces as really fantastic examples of the power of people and reciprocal support, of neighbors helping neighbors. I think recovery requires a sprawling mycelial ecology of care that includes a commitment to each other’s liberation.
For me, recovery is difficult to achieve without acknowledgement of the interconnection of struggle. In my own journey I take strength from the understanding that no fight belongs just to me, there is no single root. While I don’t personally struggle with drugs or alcohol, these struggles are woven within my own lineage and recovery story. It’s in observing how struggle, love and harm are inherited that I am reminded of the need to sit in the nuance and complexity of how we become the way we are and the way systems of oppression impact all of our recovery processes. Mutual aid can be an antidote to the feelings of alienation and shame that so many experience in processes of recovery. I want to fight for my own recovery, but also a world where recovery is accessible for all. Both recovery and solidarity are these never ending nonlinear ways of being, relationships with the world and forms of study.
Recovery can be an existential and painful process but also an incredibly generative and interesting challenge to take on. I try to meet my recovery with a curiosity and a questioning spirit, like an opportunity or a portal. I think in this world a journey towards recovery is always a creative project at the end of the day. Like mutual aid, I think recovery begins with an imagining of a different world.
You can find out more about Reed and their work on their Instagram.
Reed cooks Onigiri for our NYE Party at Strangefield Warehouse on 31st December. You can buy tickets online here. Accessible tickets are also available.
Photo above taken by Blair Geisler at Curiosathon, an event created by Harmonious Soup with support and in collaboration with Pillow Talk Scotland and Transmission Gallery.
